Richard Dansky's Blog, page 25
May 14, 2011
In case you were wondering
There are certainly drier ways to spend an evening. There are probably smarter ones. But I'm not sure there are better ones than taking a leisurely walk through a thunderstorm with my wife.
May 13, 2011
The Songs That Go Away
Something that's always been vaguely interesting to me is the question of which songs survive in the public consciousness. As awash as we are in musical throwbacks, it's curious to see which songs have become iconic tracks while others from that same time that were damn near inescapable on the radio have simply vanished. It's not even that people play them once in a while and say, "Oh yeah, that," and get back to the safety of their ironic Safety Dancing. It's that they're just...gone from the memory. Not reissued. Not used for hipster-friendly montage sequences. Left off bargain-priced compilation discs shelved prominently near the front of the consumer electronics section at Target. You get the idea. "Oh, Sheri" and "I Can't Wait" and "Only In My Dreams" stalk the sound systems of malls and Olive Gardens everywhere, but not the songs they once jostled for chart placement.
For some of them, the reason they disappear is pretty easy to point out: they were terrible songs. Nobody, and I include Dennis DeYoung's immediate family, ever needs to hear "Desert Moon" again. Then again, as terrible a song as it was, it wasn't quantifiably worse than, say, "The Search is Over", by Survivor, and that still gets trotted out at semi-regular intervals. But others were fine songs, fun songs, songs that just, for whatever reason, didn't quite maintain their grip on folks' aural real estate. They're the anti-earworms.
And so, thinking about that, here are a few that I...well, "miss" may be the wrong word, but that I hadn't heard in ages, and hadn't realized I hadn't heard until I forced myself to think about it.
XTC, "The Mayor of Simpleton" - One suspects Mike Myers watched this video a lot.
Ric Ocasek, "Emotion in Motion" - Nice that they found something to do with the sets from Legend, at least.
Sly Fox, "Let's Go All The Way" - I didn't realize this one had a P-Funk pedigree until years later.
Squeeze, "Hourglass" - Lots of Squeeze songs still get play. Not this one. (Also, Vyvyan from The Young Ones directed the video. Bonus!)
Honeymoon Suite, "Feel It Again" - Perfectly serviceable hair metalilish stuff. Honeymoon Suite never came across as douchebags, which may explain why they faded and millions of people still know who Bret Michaels and Nikki Sixx are.
Robert Tepper, "No Easy Way Out" - Songs from Stallone movies tend to fade. Anyone heard "Meet Me Halfway" lately? Still, you've got to love the fact that Tepper seems to be rocking the back end of Connor McLeod's closet from Highlander 2.
GTR, "The Hunter"/The Firm, "Radioactive" - Near as I can tell, these two were the same band.
What are yours?
For some of them, the reason they disappear is pretty easy to point out: they were terrible songs. Nobody, and I include Dennis DeYoung's immediate family, ever needs to hear "Desert Moon" again. Then again, as terrible a song as it was, it wasn't quantifiably worse than, say, "The Search is Over", by Survivor, and that still gets trotted out at semi-regular intervals. But others were fine songs, fun songs, songs that just, for whatever reason, didn't quite maintain their grip on folks' aural real estate. They're the anti-earworms.
And so, thinking about that, here are a few that I...well, "miss" may be the wrong word, but that I hadn't heard in ages, and hadn't realized I hadn't heard until I forced myself to think about it.
XTC, "The Mayor of Simpleton" - One suspects Mike Myers watched this video a lot.
Ric Ocasek, "Emotion in Motion" - Nice that they found something to do with the sets from Legend, at least.
Sly Fox, "Let's Go All The Way" - I didn't realize this one had a P-Funk pedigree until years later.
Squeeze, "Hourglass" - Lots of Squeeze songs still get play. Not this one. (Also, Vyvyan from The Young Ones directed the video. Bonus!)
Honeymoon Suite, "Feel It Again" - Perfectly serviceable hair metalilish stuff. Honeymoon Suite never came across as douchebags, which may explain why they faded and millions of people still know who Bret Michaels and Nikki Sixx are.
Robert Tepper, "No Easy Way Out" - Songs from Stallone movies tend to fade. Anyone heard "Meet Me Halfway" lately? Still, you've got to love the fact that Tepper seems to be rocking the back end of Connor McLeod's closet from Highlander 2.
GTR, "The Hunter"/The Firm, "Radioactive" - Near as I can tell, these two were the same band.
What are yours?
May 12, 2011
The Destruction of Cheltenham Elementary School
When they tear Cheltenham Elementary School down, I hope they find some of my old Matchbox cars in the rubble.
They're going to be very old Matchbox cars, mind you. Many of them won't even be Matchbox. They'll be Hot Wheels, or ERTL - I had a lot of ERTL, since Dad worked for the company that owned ERTL and had a connection. (Tough cars. Really nice, I still have a bunch.) And of course it won't just be mine they find. We all used to take 'em out and run them down a track we'd chopped out of an erosion gully next to the stairs by the fifth grade classroom. Lots of cars went missing there.
I suppose I should feel more nostalgic than I do about the old place. It was, after all, where I spent a considerable chunk of my time the first six years I lived in Cheltenham - the school went K through 5 in those days. I can still name all of my teachers - Mrs. Lombardi, for kindergarten, in whose class I learned about tape recorders for the first time, in a way that made a student teacher say "I thought he was volunteering to bite it." Mrs. Seestedt for first and second grade - those two years were mixed together - who taught me Roman numerals, and who had a student teacher whom I got into an argument with over penguins. (She thought they were mammals, I swore they were birds. We had to go down to the library to hash it out.) Mrs. Schiller for 3rd grade, the year I hung out with Tod Trabaco and got chicken pox and discovered Narnia, and the wonderful Mrs. Gussman for 4th, who introduced me to acting. (If you're curious, I played Puppet #1). And Mrs. Helen Sobel for 5th grade, a world traveler and grande dame who commanded her classroom as if it were a symphony.
A lot happened to me at that school. I played violin for a couple of weeks, then gave it up for clarinet. I got my finger smashed in a car door so thoroughly it looks like a spatula to this day. I wrecked some curves and took some tests and got beaten up a lot on the playground. I played kickball on the blacktop and wallball near the cafeteria, and I got a ton of nosebleeds that left me constantly explaining to panicking grownups that, no, tilting my head back was not a good idea. I nearly got in trouble for fighting with Chuckie Colwell there - when the recess monitor came around, we claimed we were dancing, which probably wasn't the smartest idea either - and much, much later, I had Cheltenham's finest tell me and the young lady I was with at the time to stop making out on the upper soccer field and get our keisters out of there. (It was after a Phil Collins concert. I have no excuse.) There was one playground down by the main driveway entrance, and another one back by the teachers' parking lot and the fifth grade door, and my sister fell off a swing at that one and busted her clavicle in the process. And there were two fields for soccer or wiffleball or whatever down below the parking lot with backstops and goalposts and whatnot, and in winter lots of us would trundle over there with our sleds and saucers and go zipping down those big hills. Someone always hit the metal goalposts sooner or later; one year it was me. No damage done, just a hell of a bell-ringing, and a determination to learn how to steer better after that.
I remember red wooden doors, and faded boxball courts, and a gym that seemed a lot bigger when I was small. I remember white posts, and brick, and the long coat closet in Mrs. Gussman's classroom. I remember being mad I couldn't play in concert at the end of my fifth grade year because of that smashed finger, and I remember being in the cafeteria when the old fault line that ran in the creek bed over to Glenside gave a shake that ran about 4.2 on the Richter scale.
I remember, as they say, lots of stuff. But there's no nostalgic haze that comes with it. It was a good school. I learned a lot there, in and out of the classroom. I hope the new school building serves its teachers and students as well as the old one did us. And that's about all I've got.
Though the more I think about it, the less I want them to find those Matchbox cars. Let 'em stay buried. After all, they're in the place they're meant to be.
They're going to be very old Matchbox cars, mind you. Many of them won't even be Matchbox. They'll be Hot Wheels, or ERTL - I had a lot of ERTL, since Dad worked for the company that owned ERTL and had a connection. (Tough cars. Really nice, I still have a bunch.) And of course it won't just be mine they find. We all used to take 'em out and run them down a track we'd chopped out of an erosion gully next to the stairs by the fifth grade classroom. Lots of cars went missing there.
I suppose I should feel more nostalgic than I do about the old place. It was, after all, where I spent a considerable chunk of my time the first six years I lived in Cheltenham - the school went K through 5 in those days. I can still name all of my teachers - Mrs. Lombardi, for kindergarten, in whose class I learned about tape recorders for the first time, in a way that made a student teacher say "I thought he was volunteering to bite it." Mrs. Seestedt for first and second grade - those two years were mixed together - who taught me Roman numerals, and who had a student teacher whom I got into an argument with over penguins. (She thought they were mammals, I swore they were birds. We had to go down to the library to hash it out.) Mrs. Schiller for 3rd grade, the year I hung out with Tod Trabaco and got chicken pox and discovered Narnia, and the wonderful Mrs. Gussman for 4th, who introduced me to acting. (If you're curious, I played Puppet #1). And Mrs. Helen Sobel for 5th grade, a world traveler and grande dame who commanded her classroom as if it were a symphony.
A lot happened to me at that school. I played violin for a couple of weeks, then gave it up for clarinet. I got my finger smashed in a car door so thoroughly it looks like a spatula to this day. I wrecked some curves and took some tests and got beaten up a lot on the playground. I played kickball on the blacktop and wallball near the cafeteria, and I got a ton of nosebleeds that left me constantly explaining to panicking grownups that, no, tilting my head back was not a good idea. I nearly got in trouble for fighting with Chuckie Colwell there - when the recess monitor came around, we claimed we were dancing, which probably wasn't the smartest idea either - and much, much later, I had Cheltenham's finest tell me and the young lady I was with at the time to stop making out on the upper soccer field and get our keisters out of there. (It was after a Phil Collins concert. I have no excuse.) There was one playground down by the main driveway entrance, and another one back by the teachers' parking lot and the fifth grade door, and my sister fell off a swing at that one and busted her clavicle in the process. And there were two fields for soccer or wiffleball or whatever down below the parking lot with backstops and goalposts and whatnot, and in winter lots of us would trundle over there with our sleds and saucers and go zipping down those big hills. Someone always hit the metal goalposts sooner or later; one year it was me. No damage done, just a hell of a bell-ringing, and a determination to learn how to steer better after that.
I remember red wooden doors, and faded boxball courts, and a gym that seemed a lot bigger when I was small. I remember white posts, and brick, and the long coat closet in Mrs. Gussman's classroom. I remember being mad I couldn't play in concert at the end of my fifth grade year because of that smashed finger, and I remember being in the cafeteria when the old fault line that ran in the creek bed over to Glenside gave a shake that ran about 4.2 on the Richter scale.
I remember, as they say, lots of stuff. But there's no nostalgic haze that comes with it. It was a good school. I learned a lot there, in and out of the classroom. I hope the new school building serves its teachers and students as well as the old one did us. And that's about all I've got.
Though the more I think about it, the less I want them to find those Matchbox cars. Let 'em stay buried. After all, they're in the place they're meant to be.
May 11, 2011
Respect My Au-Thor-i-tai (Mild Spoilers Enclosed)
Thor is an unlikely case for a litmus test movie. I mean, it's a superhero movie, starring a guy who's indisputably a second-rater (and for the love of God, don't start blathering at me about how he was an original Avenger and all that crap. Marvel has four characters who get name recognition from people who don't read comics: Hulk, Spidey, Wolverine, and Captain America. Thor, like Iron Man and the Fantastic Four, is a long-running second-tier character with a big budget. But hey, at least he's a step up from Dr. Strange.) that's got some actual Serious Actor pedigree. And, coming as it does in the summer of highfalutin' nerd entertainment on a Serious Channel (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones), it gets plopped squarely in the crosshairs of the cultural slap-fight currently going on over mass-market entertainment.
That being said, the movie is garnering largely positive reviews, albeit with a healthy side of proof that movie reviewers really need to do their homework in order to be taken seriously these days. It's one thing to go into a review of Thor, a movie about the Norse god of thunder, and admit you never read the comics. Hell, I haven't read the comics since the Walt Simonson days, and I'm about as core nerd demographic as you can get. It's another, on the other hand, to peer down one's aristocratic nose at a *gasp* comic book movie that has the sheer gall to call its monsters *shock* "Frost giants" and get a good giggle out of how simplistic and corny that makes the film.
(In a perfect world, there's a longship full of berserkers headed to that reviewer's house with express orders to give them a crash course in Norse mythology. But I digress.)
All of which gets in the way of the film. And the film, really, is what reviews should probably be talking about. It's what I want to talk about, and I'm already a bunch of paragraphs in and have barely mentioned it, which needs to stop right now.
Thor is directed by Kenneth Branagh, which makes absolutely no sense unless you look at the list of movies Branagh has directed. Over-the-top nerd property? Check (Frankenstein). Movie that jumps back and forth between two settings? Check (Dead Again). Movie with big fight scene? Check (Henry V). Movie with Shakespearean theme of young, unworthy prince growing into being a wise king? Check (Henry V.) Movie about prince with daddy issues? Check (Hamlet). Movie with large bearded man with huge teeth who likes eating? Check (Damn near everything he's ever done, due to Brian Blessed). So, really, the only thing that's new here is the size of the budget, and presumably he had people to help with that and explain how much money he actually had available to spend on rainbow bridges, walking suits of giant-sized flame-powered armor, and the best actor from The Wire.
Ultimately, Branagh treats the material as what it is: knockoff Shakespeare. Not serious Julie-Taymor-is-doing-the-adaptation Shakespeare, like Hamlet or The Tempest, but wacky exit-pursued-by-a-bear Shakespeare, and it works. Thor's really a Prince Hal type, the layabout Prince who's not ready to be a king even if he thinks he is. Brother Loki, played excellently devious by Tom Hiddleston, is a more complicated critter, with some Falstaff and some Iago and some Richard III in him. He's a victim of his own cleverness who really just wants his father to be proud of him, and whose constant improvisations to cover up his machinations keep making things worse. Back on earth, there's the rough mechanicals, in the form of the scientists who "rescue" Thor and show him slapsticky Earth ways. Lots of fish-out-of-water humor here, to contrast with the deadly seriousness and very...slow...deliveries back in Asgard, and if nobody actually gets up in drag and starts declaiming "Thisbe! Thisbe!", we're not far off in spirit.
Natalie Portman, in the thankless role of Dr. Jane Foster, does her best to play an actually smart scientist. She doesn't quite pull it off, largely because the script doesn't give her a ton of chances to show off her character's brains, but on the list of "devastatingly attractive women Hollywood has cast as people who should be able to lecture off the cuff for three hours on what a Higgs boson is", she comes in way more believable than Denise Richards or Darryl Hannah. Furthermore, it's nice to see Portman and her intern, Kat Dennings (whose role can best be described as "be Ellen Page") have several conversations, brief and exposition-driven though they are, that aren't about Chris Hemsworth's shirtless and manly Thor.
Hemsworth pitches his performance nicely, going for broke in the role without quite losing his "holy crap, I'm playing Thor!" smile. He's believable when he's a whiny pretty boy, he's believable when he throws a tantrum after his dumbass sense of entitlement has gotten people hurt, and he's believable as he slowly comes to the realization that there are other people besides him in the universe. Furthermore, it's a nice touch that the thing he's ultimately fighting against in the big CGI showdown at the end is precisely the sort of thing that an awful lot of movie heroes would be fighting for in this summer of Transformers 3.
It's not a great film. Nothing with that many story writers and script writers and nods to the larger Marvel continuity really could be (though Agent Coulson's world-weary Iron Man reference is worth the price of admission). To be fair, the plethora of writers does serve at least one purpose: to rein in co-story-writer J. Michael Straczynski's over-reliance on his usual tropes. (Idris Elba's Heimdall is distinctly Kosh-like. One expects him to declaim that truth is a three-edged hammer while making funny wheezing noises.)
Ultimately, though, I think, it is a good movie. The jokes are generally funny, the action is generally actiony, and while I have no doubt that Loki's plan is a little confusing for some critics (the same ones who couldn't follow the original Mission Impossible), it makes perfect character sense - he's very much the hero of his own narrative, and everything he does is to try to get others to see him that way. And if that means putting them in danger so he can save them - or getting the other hero of the story out of the way - so be it. Yes, the infodump at the beginning is both long and a bit dark, but the eye candy of Asgard saves it long enough for the good, meaty, actory bits to come along. And the big fight scene in Jotunheim (or, if you're an unedumacated film critic, Frost Giant Land) feels more like a comic book fight scene than anything I've seen since the big Spidey-Doc Ock throwdown in Spider-Man 2 .
So go. See. Enjoy. And remember that Thor and Loki have heard the chimes at midnight.
That being said, the movie is garnering largely positive reviews, albeit with a healthy side of proof that movie reviewers really need to do their homework in order to be taken seriously these days. It's one thing to go into a review of Thor, a movie about the Norse god of thunder, and admit you never read the comics. Hell, I haven't read the comics since the Walt Simonson days, and I'm about as core nerd demographic as you can get. It's another, on the other hand, to peer down one's aristocratic nose at a *gasp* comic book movie that has the sheer gall to call its monsters *shock* "Frost giants" and get a good giggle out of how simplistic and corny that makes the film.
(In a perfect world, there's a longship full of berserkers headed to that reviewer's house with express orders to give them a crash course in Norse mythology. But I digress.)
All of which gets in the way of the film. And the film, really, is what reviews should probably be talking about. It's what I want to talk about, and I'm already a bunch of paragraphs in and have barely mentioned it, which needs to stop right now.
Thor is directed by Kenneth Branagh, which makes absolutely no sense unless you look at the list of movies Branagh has directed. Over-the-top nerd property? Check (Frankenstein). Movie that jumps back and forth between two settings? Check (Dead Again). Movie with big fight scene? Check (Henry V). Movie with Shakespearean theme of young, unworthy prince growing into being a wise king? Check (Henry V.) Movie about prince with daddy issues? Check (Hamlet). Movie with large bearded man with huge teeth who likes eating? Check (Damn near everything he's ever done, due to Brian Blessed). So, really, the only thing that's new here is the size of the budget, and presumably he had people to help with that and explain how much money he actually had available to spend on rainbow bridges, walking suits of giant-sized flame-powered armor, and the best actor from The Wire.
Ultimately, Branagh treats the material as what it is: knockoff Shakespeare. Not serious Julie-Taymor-is-doing-the-adaptation Shakespeare, like Hamlet or The Tempest, but wacky exit-pursued-by-a-bear Shakespeare, and it works. Thor's really a Prince Hal type, the layabout Prince who's not ready to be a king even if he thinks he is. Brother Loki, played excellently devious by Tom Hiddleston, is a more complicated critter, with some Falstaff and some Iago and some Richard III in him. He's a victim of his own cleverness who really just wants his father to be proud of him, and whose constant improvisations to cover up his machinations keep making things worse. Back on earth, there's the rough mechanicals, in the form of the scientists who "rescue" Thor and show him slapsticky Earth ways. Lots of fish-out-of-water humor here, to contrast with the deadly seriousness and very...slow...deliveries back in Asgard, and if nobody actually gets up in drag and starts declaiming "Thisbe! Thisbe!", we're not far off in spirit.
Natalie Portman, in the thankless role of Dr. Jane Foster, does her best to play an actually smart scientist. She doesn't quite pull it off, largely because the script doesn't give her a ton of chances to show off her character's brains, but on the list of "devastatingly attractive women Hollywood has cast as people who should be able to lecture off the cuff for three hours on what a Higgs boson is", she comes in way more believable than Denise Richards or Darryl Hannah. Furthermore, it's nice to see Portman and her intern, Kat Dennings (whose role can best be described as "be Ellen Page") have several conversations, brief and exposition-driven though they are, that aren't about Chris Hemsworth's shirtless and manly Thor.
Hemsworth pitches his performance nicely, going for broke in the role without quite losing his "holy crap, I'm playing Thor!" smile. He's believable when he's a whiny pretty boy, he's believable when he throws a tantrum after his dumbass sense of entitlement has gotten people hurt, and he's believable as he slowly comes to the realization that there are other people besides him in the universe. Furthermore, it's a nice touch that the thing he's ultimately fighting against in the big CGI showdown at the end is precisely the sort of thing that an awful lot of movie heroes would be fighting for in this summer of Transformers 3.
It's not a great film. Nothing with that many story writers and script writers and nods to the larger Marvel continuity really could be (though Agent Coulson's world-weary Iron Man reference is worth the price of admission). To be fair, the plethora of writers does serve at least one purpose: to rein in co-story-writer J. Michael Straczynski's over-reliance on his usual tropes. (Idris Elba's Heimdall is distinctly Kosh-like. One expects him to declaim that truth is a three-edged hammer while making funny wheezing noises.)
Ultimately, though, I think, it is a good movie. The jokes are generally funny, the action is generally actiony, and while I have no doubt that Loki's plan is a little confusing for some critics (the same ones who couldn't follow the original Mission Impossible), it makes perfect character sense - he's very much the hero of his own narrative, and everything he does is to try to get others to see him that way. And if that means putting them in danger so he can save them - or getting the other hero of the story out of the way - so be it. Yes, the infodump at the beginning is both long and a bit dark, but the eye candy of Asgard saves it long enough for the good, meaty, actory bits to come along. And the big fight scene in Jotunheim (or, if you're an unedumacated film critic, Frost Giant Land) feels more like a comic book fight scene than anything I've seen since the big Spidey-Doc Ock throwdown in Spider-Man 2 .
So go. See. Enjoy. And remember that Thor and Loki have heard the chimes at midnight.
May 8, 2011
21 Things I Learned At WHC 2011
If you're standing in a hole, stop digging. This applies for waiters as well as writers.If you're offering around shots of whisky, make sure it's a whisky that doesn't need a splash. Beverage logistics are the last thing you want to be dealing with at that point, with "that point" defined as "2 AM after you've already emptied a significant portion of the bottle".Zombies aren't going away any time soon.The utter gorgeousness of a book you want to buy (especially from, say, Centipede Press) is inversely proportional to the likelihood of you getting it home without either TSA, baggage handlers, or your own damn clumsy self having bludgeoned it into something roughly circular.Every party's better if you can find someone to discuss Troll 2 and Rare Exports with.There is in fact a sports bar chain (called The Bikini Bar, natch) that took a look at Hooters and went, "Naah. Too classy." The fact that I would point out #6 means I am getting old. My first reaction to the entire waitstaff was "Can I buy you girls a sandwich?"And the worst part is, the burger was lousy.There is nothing quite like the moment of awkward silence when two writers who like each other and like each other's writing come face to face and admit that they haven't had time to read the other's latest book...or two or three.The guys in the dealers' room, on the other hand, love this, as guilt-driven purchases are just as valid as any other.Offering a shot of scotch with each book sold gets more laughs than customers. You can add "punk" to anything. That doesn't necessarily mean you should.Bats are temperamental divas, and cannot be expected to perform on cue.Nothing is more annoying than someone's cell phone going off during a reading, Nothing is funnier than someone's cell phone going off right after the author has read the word "silence". Ominously.In a building full of horror writers, a Rush concert t-shirt is always a good conversation starter. Even Google Maps cannot untangle the non-Euclidean horror that is the Austin highway grid.If you put Bigfoot on a book cover, I am 74% more likely to buy it.Calculating the number of books you have room for in your luggage as a function of how many books you unload over the weekend is about as effective as making career decisions based on readings of animal entrails.There's much to be said for sitting down with an author whose work you enjoy and spending a couple of hours debating regional accents and Lovecraft.In a six story hotel, getting on an elevator headed in the "wrong" direction is not actually going to cost you much time, and as such is unworthy of Hamlet-level angst over the decision to step on board.The first thing you do when seeing someone you know at a con is try to remember the last con you saw them at.
May 5, 2011
Phat Book L00t from WHC
So when I got to World Horror Convention, I told myself I wasn't going to buy books. Not that I didn't want to buy books, mind you, but Melinda and I have a lot of books. We've got books in the bedroom. We've got books on top of the DVD rack. We've got books on a windowsill in the dining room. We have a bookshelf full in my office closet. We have, in short, more books than we have any sane notion of what to do with, pending some sort of apocalypse that destroys the rest of humanity and leaves us multiple pairs of eyeglasses with which to avoid ironic Serlingian fates. So as gorgeous as the books were, I was resolved that I wasn't going to buy any. At least, not until Sunday, when I'd know how much space I had in my suitcase from selling those last straggling copies of Firefly Rain at the mass autographing (but that's another story).
So Sunday rolls around. I'm mostly packed. It's 10:30 AM. The dealer's room is open. And I decide to take a stroll around, since I sold a couple of books, so I could, you know. See if anything really, really grabbed me. Because I wasn't going to buy any books, even on a Sunday, unless they really, really grabbed me.
Next thing I know, I'm in my hotel, sitting carefully balanced on top of a perfect replica of Devil's Tower I've constructed out of the books I've bought, alternately cackling "My precious," "This means something," and "Oh God, my wife's going to kill me."
Below, the evidence, or at least some of what I picked up:
In Concert , Steve and Melanie Tem - Centipede Press makes absolutely gorgeous books, and this one, a collection of short fiction from the Tems, is no different. I don't know what mad genius decided to match their words with a Dali piece for the cover, but whoever you are, bravo. Now the trick will be working up the nerve to actually crack the book and read it, as I don't want to risk damage to book-as-artifact and I'm an absolute beast on books.
Dweller , Jeff Strand - I'm a sucker for anything Bigfoot. I'm a sucker for anything Jeff Strand. So when Jeff Strand does a Bigfoot book, well, forget it. There goes my money.
Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories , Joe R. Lansdale - Somewhere, I've got a mass market edition of Lansdale's first short fiction collection, Bestsellers Guaranteed . For no reason that I can comprehend, it has a dragon on the cover. This one, well, let's just say there are no dragons.
Vanilla Ride , Joe R. Lansdale - Because I loves me some Hap and Leonard, and I need to catch up before picking up Devil Red.
The Bone Forest , Robert Holdstock - The 1991 Grafton UK edition. My beaten-up paperback thanks it for coming along.
The King In Yellow , Robert Chambers - The Ace edition, with the same font for the title that's been made immortal by a zillion Star Trek novels. I picked it up as my freebie from a "buy two books from the top of the table, get one free from the bottom" deal, and it seemed like a better pickup than House of Caine by Ken Eulo. Seriously, every used bookstore and flea market I've ever been to has one copy of House of Caine by Ken Eulo. I don't know Ken Eulo. I've never read his book. But I remain convinced that it's actually part of some demonic plot, and that when the stars come wrong, all of those copies will suddenly blossom into monstrous, devouring corruption and blot out the sky with their hellish blooms. Either that, or they just printed a hell of a lot of horror novels back in the day.
Planet Stories Double Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star , Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale - Neither of the two dudes on the cover of this Planet Stories double feature are wearing shirts. One has a sword and what looks like an adult diaper. One has a shield, a ray gun, a circlet, and male pattern baldness. God, I love pulps. (OK, this one was actually in the con goodie bag, along with a couple of others, but damnit, it's pulps!)
Growing Dread , C. Dombrowski, editor - Given to me by the marvelous Angel McCoy, who in turn edited Night-Mantled (which you should be reading right now, instead of this). The cover claims it's bio-punk; Angel swears her story is 90% bio and 10% punk. I look forward to determining the exact ratios in the other stories.
Let's Play White , by Chesya Burke - All weekend, I told Chesya I was going to be picking up a copy of the book on Sunday and that I wanted her to sign it. When I picked it up, though, she was already gone. How dare she put airline schedules ahead of signing a book for me? Then again, she got blurbs from Nikki Giovanni and Samuel R. Delany, so clearly, she wins. She wins a lot.
A Mammoth Murder , by Bill Crider - It's got a Bigfoot on the cover. I'm sold.
So Sunday rolls around. I'm mostly packed. It's 10:30 AM. The dealer's room is open. And I decide to take a stroll around, since I sold a couple of books, so I could, you know. See if anything really, really grabbed me. Because I wasn't going to buy any books, even on a Sunday, unless they really, really grabbed me.
Next thing I know, I'm in my hotel, sitting carefully balanced on top of a perfect replica of Devil's Tower I've constructed out of the books I've bought, alternately cackling "My precious," "This means something," and "Oh God, my wife's going to kill me."
Below, the evidence, or at least some of what I picked up:
In Concert , Steve and Melanie Tem - Centipede Press makes absolutely gorgeous books, and this one, a collection of short fiction from the Tems, is no different. I don't know what mad genius decided to match their words with a Dali piece for the cover, but whoever you are, bravo. Now the trick will be working up the nerve to actually crack the book and read it, as I don't want to risk damage to book-as-artifact and I'm an absolute beast on books.
Dweller , Jeff Strand - I'm a sucker for anything Bigfoot. I'm a sucker for anything Jeff Strand. So when Jeff Strand does a Bigfoot book, well, forget it. There goes my money.
Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories , Joe R. Lansdale - Somewhere, I've got a mass market edition of Lansdale's first short fiction collection, Bestsellers Guaranteed . For no reason that I can comprehend, it has a dragon on the cover. This one, well, let's just say there are no dragons.
Vanilla Ride , Joe R. Lansdale - Because I loves me some Hap and Leonard, and I need to catch up before picking up Devil Red.
The Bone Forest , Robert Holdstock - The 1991 Grafton UK edition. My beaten-up paperback thanks it for coming along.
The King In Yellow , Robert Chambers - The Ace edition, with the same font for the title that's been made immortal by a zillion Star Trek novels. I picked it up as my freebie from a "buy two books from the top of the table, get one free from the bottom" deal, and it seemed like a better pickup than House of Caine by Ken Eulo. Seriously, every used bookstore and flea market I've ever been to has one copy of House of Caine by Ken Eulo. I don't know Ken Eulo. I've never read his book. But I remain convinced that it's actually part of some demonic plot, and that when the stars come wrong, all of those copies will suddenly blossom into monstrous, devouring corruption and blot out the sky with their hellish blooms. Either that, or they just printed a hell of a lot of horror novels back in the day.
Planet Stories Double Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star , Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale - Neither of the two dudes on the cover of this Planet Stories double feature are wearing shirts. One has a sword and what looks like an adult diaper. One has a shield, a ray gun, a circlet, and male pattern baldness. God, I love pulps. (OK, this one was actually in the con goodie bag, along with a couple of others, but damnit, it's pulps!)
Growing Dread , C. Dombrowski, editor - Given to me by the marvelous Angel McCoy, who in turn edited Night-Mantled (which you should be reading right now, instead of this). The cover claims it's bio-punk; Angel swears her story is 90% bio and 10% punk. I look forward to determining the exact ratios in the other stories.
Let's Play White , by Chesya Burke - All weekend, I told Chesya I was going to be picking up a copy of the book on Sunday and that I wanted her to sign it. When I picked it up, though, she was already gone. How dare she put airline schedules ahead of signing a book for me? Then again, she got blurbs from Nikki Giovanni and Samuel R. Delany, so clearly, she wins. She wins a lot.
A Mammoth Murder , by Bill Crider - It's got a Bigfoot on the cover. I'm sold.
April 28, 2011
Citrus Domination Sorbet
Start with five blood oranges. Add a couple of limes. Then toss in four lemons, and an orange that just happens to be hanging around the kitchen and would feel left out if it were the lone citrus survivor. Squeeze and blend thoroughly. Drop in some Grand Marnier for reasons of chemistry, add a simple syrup, and voila.
You've got a very tart slushie. No real pulp to hold the matrix together, so we're in Slurpee land pretty much right off the bad. The color's gorgeous, almost a magenta, and the taste is very sharp. This is a palate cleanser, not a dessert. Good thing the color's so eye-catching; it'll be suitably decorative in those few moments before it suffers a nervous breakdown and goes all liquid.
And yes, I'm making sorbet as I'm doing laundry and packing and cleaning the house and God knows what else in preparation for heading off to World Horror Con tomorrow. Doesn't everyone?
You've got a very tart slushie. No real pulp to hold the matrix together, so we're in Slurpee land pretty much right off the bad. The color's gorgeous, almost a magenta, and the taste is very sharp. This is a palate cleanser, not a dessert. Good thing the color's so eye-catching; it'll be suitably decorative in those few moments before it suffers a nervous breakdown and goes all liquid.
And yes, I'm making sorbet as I'm doing laundry and packing and cleaning the house and God knows what else in preparation for heading off to World Horror Con tomorrow. Doesn't everyone?
April 27, 2011
I Wish...
...I could tell you about all the cool fiction writing I did tonight, but I can't, mainly because I didn't do any.
I did do a couple of other things. FOr one, I finished and polished this month's Storytellers Unplugged Essay, which is going up shortly. To put it bluntly, it now seems as if there are more people trying to give serious writing advice on the internet than there are actual writers out there,which means that if I try to be deeply serious and useful, based on my somewhat unusual writing career path, I'm likely to come up with something that's either been done to death before in one of the nine million other writing how-to blogs, or I'm going to come up with something that will be incredibly useful only to people who started their writing career by doing academic papers, graduating then to roleplaying games, humorous essays, fiction and video games, with a side of book reviews, some of which were written under a pen name which strongly indicated that the author was a seal.
I'm guessing there aren't too many of those out there.
Which is why this month I just said "the heck with it" and wrote about a couple of things I see in speculative fiction writing that annoy the living hell out of me. Back cover text that reads like someone went face-first into a Scrabble box? You're on notice. You too, science fiction that hasn't figured out how cell phones work.
I also watched the second episode of Game of Thrones with Melinda, who's taking off for an extended weekend with family tomorrow. GoT is the reason we signed up for HBO, and I've also been pinged about doing episode reviews for a website. In many ways, I'm probably the best possible case for a reviewer for the series, as I've got solid nerd cred but haven't read the books. Why not, you ask? Because I had no intention of getting hooked on a series, then being forced to wait N years until the next installment came out. Which, you have to admit, has worked out pretty well for me. But I digress.
Short summary of GoT so far, incidentally: tall skinny blonde people are often evil perverts. Redheads are noble pragmatists. And brunettes can't control their sensual appetites. The guys with the glowing blue eyes? I've got nothing.
And I made sorbet. Blackberry-lemon, to be precise. It came out a little sweet - I went a little strong on the sugar - but with a very good consistency. The blackberry mostly overpowered the lemon, but there was enough of the citrus tang left in it to keep things interesting. And I guessed the quantities right - the whole kit and kaboodle fit perfectly in one large yogurt container. Yay me, yay freezer space.
Fiction? Tomorrow. Definitely.
In the meantime, anyone want some sorbet?
I did do a couple of other things. FOr one, I finished and polished this month's Storytellers Unplugged Essay, which is going up shortly. To put it bluntly, it now seems as if there are more people trying to give serious writing advice on the internet than there are actual writers out there,which means that if I try to be deeply serious and useful, based on my somewhat unusual writing career path, I'm likely to come up with something that's either been done to death before in one of the nine million other writing how-to blogs, or I'm going to come up with something that will be incredibly useful only to people who started their writing career by doing academic papers, graduating then to roleplaying games, humorous essays, fiction and video games, with a side of book reviews, some of which were written under a pen name which strongly indicated that the author was a seal.
I'm guessing there aren't too many of those out there.
Which is why this month I just said "the heck with it" and wrote about a couple of things I see in speculative fiction writing that annoy the living hell out of me. Back cover text that reads like someone went face-first into a Scrabble box? You're on notice. You too, science fiction that hasn't figured out how cell phones work.
I also watched the second episode of Game of Thrones with Melinda, who's taking off for an extended weekend with family tomorrow. GoT is the reason we signed up for HBO, and I've also been pinged about doing episode reviews for a website. In many ways, I'm probably the best possible case for a reviewer for the series, as I've got solid nerd cred but haven't read the books. Why not, you ask? Because I had no intention of getting hooked on a series, then being forced to wait N years until the next installment came out. Which, you have to admit, has worked out pretty well for me. But I digress.
Short summary of GoT so far, incidentally: tall skinny blonde people are often evil perverts. Redheads are noble pragmatists. And brunettes can't control their sensual appetites. The guys with the glowing blue eyes? I've got nothing.
And I made sorbet. Blackberry-lemon, to be precise. It came out a little sweet - I went a little strong on the sugar - but with a very good consistency. The blackberry mostly overpowered the lemon, but there was enough of the citrus tang left in it to keep things interesting. And I guessed the quantities right - the whole kit and kaboodle fit perfectly in one large yogurt container. Yay me, yay freezer space.
Fiction? Tomorrow. Definitely.
In the meantime, anyone want some sorbet?
